It seems ironic that, at a time when there's so much in the news about tremendous amounts of patient data being leaked (data that's actually supposed to be private), data about physician malpractice that should be public is being removed from the Internet by the government.

The National Practitioner Data Bank has since been yanked by the government agency, even though the reporter had only accessed and used information freely available in the public section of the database. From this information, he was apparently able to sleuth out who some of the unnamed parties were, and deduce that they hadn't received any kind of disciplinary action. His whistle-blowing story was subsequently published.

The question is, where's the patient advocacy in all of this? We need physicians to keep an eye on us, but part of our ability to trust them to do that comes from our ability to keep an eye on them. The Internet has helped us to do this. Individual physicians absolutely have the right to protected private lives. But we have the right to know something about who we are being treated by, and something about what their records look like.

A number of journalism organizations have publicly protested this mess. You can read about their position and letter here.

What do you think about this battle of rights? Tell us in the TalkBacks below.

Denise Amrich is a Registered Nurse who also has 20 years of operations, logistics, and editorial management experience. She is the health care advisor for the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute, and a mentor for the Virtual Campus at Florida's Brevard Community College.Denise co-founded ZATZ Publishing, and has been the managing editor...
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Denise Amrich is a Registered Nurse in the State of Florida and is subject to all the rules and restrictions of licensure in that state.Nothing Denise writes is meant to be a substitute for medical advice, and shouldn't be considered as such. If you are in need of medical help, please see your doctor. Denise is the health care advisor for the U.S. Strategic Perspective Institute, and a mentor for the Virtual Campus at Florida's Brevard Community College.From time to time, Denise may practice nursing at various Central Florida facilities. She is restricted by HIPAA law from disclosing details about patients and practices in those clinical settings.Denise co-founded ZATZ Publishing, an online publisher of technical magazines. Other than her co-ownership of Component Enterprises, Inc. (the parent company of ZATZ), she has no additional investments.